Against All Odds

by P. J. Naworynski

  With an upset within sight and less than a minute to go until the end of the game, Murray caught a shot and casually threw it out to defenceman André Laperrière right in front of him. It was something Murray had done thousands of times over the years. The ref blew his whistle, stopped the play, and waved Dowey off to “la prison” for a two-minute penalty. Murray was dumbfounded. According to Olympic rules, the puck must be dropped and then put into play. Murray was in violation for “throwing” the puck forward.

  As Murray skated by the Flyers bench on his way to the penalty box, Frank Boucher grabbed his goal stick. He shook his head disapprovingly and chastised Dowey quietly, telling him, “You shouldn’t have done that. You shouldn’t have done that.” Murray’s toss could very well cost the Flyers the win. The Swedes pulled their goalie and prepared to pounce with six attackers on the ice.

  The pressure was on the Flyers to maintain their lead and preserve a victory. Although backup goalie Ross King was standing by and physically able to play, the rules dictated that Boucher was allowed to dress only one goalie per game. Boucher had to leave the net empty or pull from one of his ten remaining dressed players.

  He called the boys to the bench and rallied for one of them to slide in between the posts. He leaned in close and said, “This is it, do or die. Who’s going to play goalie?” Nobody said a word. Nobody stepped forward. Again Frank asked, “Come on, guys. Somebody has to go in net!” Again he was met with dead silence. None of them were willing to volunteer and shoulder that burden. Meanwhile the ref skated over and told Boucher, “If you don’t make up your mind, I’m giving the win to the Swedes.”

  André Laperrière, Murray’s best friend and roommate, grabbed the goal stick and made his way to the net. André had never played goalie and was terrified the Swedes would score on him and he’d let his team down. But as a defenceman he felt it was his duty to at least try. The six-foot-two Laperrière crouched down in net with a death grip on Murray’s stick and waited for the impending Swiss assault. But André’s teammates weren’t about to turtle now. The Flyers took it to the Swedish attackers and played a tight, strong defence. They controlled the puck and stifled the six Swedish attackers from firing anything of substance at André as he quivered in the net. The young defenceman had only to deal with a flimsy shot from a distance. Victory was sealed. The underdogs handily defeated the second-ranked Swedes in what reporters described as a “tough, bruising contest.”

  Back in Ottawa the headlines read: “Spring Surprise at the Olympic Games.” Sandy Watson and Frank Boucher were elated. For the boys on the team, the battle with the Swedes was an eye-opener to the kind of refereeing they could expect for the remainder of the Games. Any body contact they delivered seemed to draw a penalty, whereas European stick wizardry appeared to go unpunished.

  As the boys inhaled their dinners in the dining room at the Stahlbad, they were ecstatic. Despite all the bad press and all the negativity that was heaped onto their backs at home, they knew they had the capacity to take on the best and persevere. Since they weren’t playing the next day, Sandy approved a bus trip into the centre of town so the boys could do some shopping and soak up the heady atmosphere on display. Cafes and restaurants like Hanselman’s, Steffani’s, the Palace Bar, and Chesa Veglia were chock full of visitors enjoying a vast assortment of luscious pastries, cakes, specialty coffees, and drinks. St. Moritz was more packed than it had been in decades. The town was abuzz as spectators rubbed shoulders in the packed streets and cafes with Hollywood movie stars like Joan Crawford and Jennifer Jones. To accommodate the swelling crowds, some hotels had converted reading rooms and other public spaces into temporary bedrooms. Others had even set up temporary overnight beds in the public bathrooms. Back at the Stahlbad the boys learned that their hotel had been closed for the past ten years. It had reopened only recently to accommodate the onslaught of visitors for the Winter Olympic Games.

  The players explored the town and peered into the windows of various high-end jewellery shops and watchmakers looking for mementos and potential gifts to bring back to their wives and sweethearts. Many of the local shops also plastered giant pictures of the day’s activities in their windows. Local photographers attempting to make a quick handful of francs offered freshly printed custom postcards from snapshots they had captured earlier in the day. Reg Schroeter, Red Gravelle, and Hubert Brooks had cameras and figured they would come back during the daylight to snap some candid pictures of their own.

  Throughout the village a number of massive, elaborate three-storey snow sculptures adorned the outside of posh hotels and the odd street corner. While the boys wandered about, buying a few souvenirs and joking with one another about the shenanigans from the game, trainer George McFaul was already asleep back at the hotel. He had a pre-dawn train ride ahead of him the next day to get the boys’ skates sharpened. The nearest available spot was in the town of Davos, about forty miles away.

  That night the Flyers hit their pillows and dared to allow fleeting images of Olympic gold to run through their dreams. No doubt the Czechoslovakian top guns had similar thoughts as they tucked into their beds on a separate floor at the Stahlbad. In the Czechs’ first game they had smothered Italy 22–3. As far as the top team in Europe was concerned, the gold medal was as good as theirs.

  The next morning a bright sun and blue skies greeted the citizens of St. Moritz. It was a glorious winter day. Temperatures hovered around minus nine degrees Celsius, snow conditions were excellent, and the skies were crystal clear. It was Day 2 of official competition, but for the men on the Flyers it was a day off. After a hearty breakfast the boys flitted around to the four outdoor rinks so they could check out some of the other teams they’d be playing against over the coming week. They watched as England defeated the Austrians 5–4, the Swiss destroyed Italy 16–0, the United States obliterated Poland 24–3, and the Czechs took down Sweden 6–3. A few of the teams were clearly head and shoulders better than the rest. The Czechs, Swiss, and AHA American squad were impressive teams on the ice. Patsy Guzzo confided in his journal: “There is no doubt that it’s going to be a tough battle all the way.”

  Hubert Brooks took advantage of the down day to cozy up with his fiancée. Together they spent some time with two of Bea’s friends, Canadian figure skater Marilyn Ruth and Austrian figure skater Eva Pawlik. Brooks was also on hand to help Sandy with the many language hurdles the manager faced in St. Moritz. As a unilingual anglophone, Watson often relied on Hubert, with his mastery of French, Polish, Russian, German, Czechoslovakian, and Ukrainian, to help him communicate with foreign officials and various representatives for team business matters. Since Brooks wasn’t likely to be lacing up for the Olympic matches, Watson formally made him his aide-de-camp. Meanwhile, Coach Frank Boucher thought long and hard about his lineup. Although he was pleased with the Flyers’ opening match against the Swedes, Frank decided on a single change: Irving Taylor was out and Red Gravelle was in. Some of the boys speculated it was because Irving tended to hang on to the puck a bit too much. Frank Boucher never disclosed his reasoning.

  First thing Sunday morning Patsy Guzzo bolted out of bed and headed into town to attend mass at St. Karl Church. It was Day 3 of the Winter Olympic Games, and the Flyers were slated to play Britain at the Palace rink in a couple of hours. Yesterday’s blue skies were a thing of the past, and wintery weather had once again rolled into the pristine mountain village.

  By the time Patsy made it back to the Stahlbad, most of the other guys were almost finished getting suited up in full equipment in their rooms. They paraded through the hallways and climbed onto a waiting bus that took them and the British team over to the Palace. Under a steady snowfall, two thousand fans filtered into the stands and lined up four-deep along the boards. Others scrambled up onto the hills in their thick woollen jackets and caps to stake out a spot in the knee-deep snow.

  This was a big game for the Flyers and for the nation. It had been twelve long years since the last Winter Olympics, when Britain
essentially stole the gold medal from Canada in Garmisch-Partenkirchen using a roster full of Canadian-raised players. Up until 1936 Canada had always claimed the gold medal in hockey at the Winter Olympics. It was time for the boys in blue to take on the defending Olympic champions and reclaim Canada’s place at the pinnacle of hockey supremacy.

  After the pre-game warm-up Boucher pulled in his boys for a last-minute reminder. He ordered them to go out fast and go out hard, with five men attacking from the opening whistle. The Flyers went on the offensive right from the start. Boucher’s strategy paid off. The Flyers dominated, taking control of the puck. One minute and eight seconds into the first period, Reg Schroeter fielded a nifty pass from his buddy Ab Renaud and let lose a bullet that beat the British netminder.

  As the unrelenting snow swirled around the rink and converted the ice into a slushy mess, the Flyers continued to pour on the pressure. Wally Halder and Ab Renaud both rang pucks off the British goalpost and narrowly missed out on adding to the Flyers’ tally.

  Despite the heavy and consistent snowfall, the Flyers and the British team both played at a fast clip, but the blinding snow coupled with some incompetent refereeing quickly turned the game into a farce. At times the players could barely see the puck through the squalls, and the referees began to call penalties for questionable offences almost on a whim. The pace of the game slowed to a crawl as the referees stopped game play five separate times in the first period alone and sent players from both clubs to the penalty box. Canadian Press reporter Jack Sullivan wrote: “The march to the penalty box was a joke among players of both clubs.” After the first few penalties the fans began a chorus of hooting and yodelling with each new ludicrous penalty call. The players, too, began to crack jokes with one another as the penalties became more and more baffling.

  Roy Forbes and some of the other boys who had been warming the benches on both sides joined the action and wielded snow shovels to help clear the growing snowdrifts that clogged the ice surface. Slowly but surely, the game lumbered on. At four minutes into the second period George Mara stickhandled his way through the British defence and popped in the Flyers’ second goal of the game. Again the boys shovelled the rink, and again the refs called penalty after penalty while the two-thousand-plus spectators whistled, hooted, and howled with laughter.

  Nine more penalties were called in the second period despite the cleanly played match. This was nothing like the rough and scrappy game against the Swedes, and the boys on the Flyers could not make head or tail of what the refs were calling or why. When Wally Halder took a pass from Reg Schroeter and deftly beat the British goalie with a sweet backhand, the Swiss goal judge claimed the puck never entered the net. Players from both teams argued with the refs. Even the British players were saying it was a perfectly legal goal. Sandy Watson was livid. He stormed over to the IOC officials and formally protested to have the Swiss goal judge replaced.

  By the time the boys faced off at the start of the third period, the game was already well over two hours on. The barrage of snow was turning into a full-on driving snowstorm and yet the game continued. The parade to the penalty box intensified at a dizzying pace, with the refs calling seven more penalties. At the sixteen-minute mark of the final period, Wally Halder took a pass at his own blue line and drove in through the blinding snow to score the Flyers’ third goal of the game. The British fought hard in the dying minutes, but Fast Hands Dowey was simply unbeatable, and the Flyers’ consistent backchecking dismantled the British attackers’ scoring attempts.

  After nearly three and a half hours, the marathon match limped to a close under whiteout conditions, and a swirling blizzard overtook the region. The Flyers chalked up their second win in a row, and star goalie Murray Dowey grabbed a shutout in the 3–0 win. On their way back to the hotel Murray and the boys joked with one another about the terrible ice conditions and the mind-boggling parade to the penalty box. When all was said and done, the refs had called twenty-one penalties even though it was a clean game. From the sidelines Roy Forbes figured they would have beaten the Brits by a good ten goals if the game had been played on decent ice with solid refereeing. For most of the guys it hardly felt like a hockey game at all, but nonetheless they were all pleased with the win.

  Back in Canada their two-game winning streak was surprising news. The team that was condemned at every turn and verbally torn apart before departure was performing incredibly well. So far the Flyers were far from a national embarrassment; rather, they were proving to be worthy representatives of what Canada as a nation had become.

  Suddenly, the underdogs’ Olympic run for the podium struck a chord with the masses back at home, and congratulatory telegrams began to trickle in to the hotel in St. Moritz. Those who were close to the team had never wavered in their faith of what the boys in blue were capable of. André Laperrière’s father was riveted to the family radio in their living room back in Montreal. André’s sister, Renée, remembers her dad listening to the news reports with his ear pressed so tight to the coils on the box that she thought he was going to go right through it. He was ecstatic and kept chanting over and over to Renée and her mother, “Oh, they’re going to make it, they’re going to make it!”

  Benchside with the boys as they enjoy tea service during an Olympic match.

  Ted Hibberd

  IN THE THICK OF IT

  13

  A baking hot sun blazed down onto St. Moritz first thing Monday, February 2. The previous day’s oppressive curtain of snowy skies was replaced with a cloudless robin’s egg blue. Murray Dowey, Patsy Guzzo, Andy Gilpin, and trainer George McFaul headed out from the Stahlbad bright and early to play spectators and take in the speed skating and figure skating events. There was no morning practice, and the boys wanted to soak up a few of the festivities and go shout and cheer for the Canadian skaters.

  Other spectators flocked to the hills to watch the men’s downhill followed by the winter pentathlon. While visitors slowly made their way to the bottom of the slopes, many of the locals chose a more efficient mode of transportation and simply cross-country skied through the thick, sticky snow. It was Day 4 of the Olympics, and the Flyers didn’t have to take to the ice for their match against Poland until 3:00 p.m.

  The picturesque mountain town with its luxurious shops and wealthy visitors made it easy to forget that just a few years earlier, the world had been embroiled in chaotic and bloody combat. But like England and France, many countries were still deeply scarred by the war. Poland, for example, a country that had been invaded and occupied by both the Germans and the Russians, lost a fifth of its population during the war—the highest percentage of any country involved. What’s more, it also lost a fifth of its territory when the peacetime borders were redrawn. Now a smaller country as well as a Soviet satellite, Poland was trying to rebuild its devastated cities and feed its long-suffering population. And yet, out of the ashes of battle, somehow the Poles had managed to pull together a hockey team to bring to St. Moritz. And they were next to challenge the Flyers.

  As the day wore on, the direct heat from the winter sun had begun to melt and soften the ice. By the time the Flyers and the Poles arrived at the Suvretta ice rink, dressed and ready for their match, pools of water and slush had turned the surface into a sticky mess. Both teams hunkered down and waited for the sun to drop—and pull down the temperature with it—so the ice would have a chance to harden up. About half an hour later the ice, though far from perfect, was good enough to give it a go.

  The boys warmed up in front of a thinned-out crowd of about two hundred people. True to form, Coach Frank Boucher again lectured his team about the importance of scoring a lot of goals while playing a tight defence. Running up a big score against a weaker team went against all the tenets of good sportsmanship. But it was a painful necessity. If in the end it all came down to their goal average, they had to make sure they had blasted in enough pucks to stay in contention with the high-scoring Czech team. Just a day earlier, the Czechs had fleeced the Poles
13–2.

  From the puck drop the Flyers completely overwhelmed and outclassed their Polish opponents. The Poles played with heart, but they were no match for the Canadians. Back in the Flyers net, Murray Dowey was thankful the temperature wasn’t too cold. He occupied his time by skating back and forth from side to side through his goal crease, marking up the ice around his net just the way he liked it. He kept a watchful eye on the play in front of him, but he barely faced one shot in the opening twenty minutes of play. By the end of the first period the Flyers were already up 5–0.

  Many of the Canadians felt terrible for the Polish players with their ill-fitting skates and equipment, especially former Polish resistance fighter Hubert Brooks. He had lived and fought side by side with the Poles for a couple of years, and he had a deep connection to and affinity for his Polish brothers. Without the help of friendly Polish allies, Hubert would have likely languished in a POW camp or been killed by his German captors. But this wasn’t life or death. Here on the ice in St. Moritz, the Canadians had come to play a game. And they had come to reclaim the title of Olympic champions.

  Brooks’s conscience was eased by the fact that although the Flyers dominated control of the puck, men from both teams played a classy game. Opposing players helped each other up off the ice, and there were no cheap shots, heavy hits, or aggressive body blows throughout the game. Line after line, the men of the Flyers simply outskated and outplayed the inferior Polish team.

  Chivalry and goodwill were also on display in good measure. In between periods George McFaul served fresh hot tea with lemons to players on both squads. When the Polish goalie got a cut on his nose courtesy of a deflected shot, Sandy Watson pulled out his medical kit and stitched him up as he sat on the Flyers bench.